


how long does it take to make the woods (as long as it takes to make the world)

by Razzaroo



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Body Horror, Multi, Plant Gansey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-08 11:16:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15242169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Razzaroo/pseuds/Razzaroo
Summary: Gansey finds another forest. Cabeswater's gift is not without strings.





	1. the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way to the high, original standing of the trees

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when you drink heavily and indulge in a lot of Hozier: something half experimental (the subject matter) and half familiar (the format.) If there's anyone out there who's into plant boy Gansey and consequences of messing with vague, Maggie-how-does-this-work magic, I hope this rings your bell :)
> 
> the title, the chapter name(s) and the excerpt come from Wendell Berry's "Sabbaths 1985, V"

_How long does it take to make the woods?_  
As long as it takes to make the world.  
The woods is present as the world is, the presence  
of all its past and of all its time to come.  
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act  
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.

**_Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1985 V_ **

**_***_ **

 

Gansey finds another forest.

He’s in England, insisting it’s just a break to find his thoughts again, and stumbles on it by accident. The sky had been a blur of grey, the trees bare of leaves, and the air cold and slippery around his face. He is alone on the trail; the car park had had only one other car, old and dusty, and he has an itching feeling that the owner is long gone.

That should have been sign number one.

The mud sucks his feet down and everything smells of rotting leaves; the wall of trees, bare though they are, muffle any traffic sound. Time feels strange. After half living in Cabeswater for months, he’s desensitised to what makes forests abnormal.  It feels as much home as anywhere else.

He takes a step and the ground sizzles beneath him, a shudder of power that he shouldn’t know but he does. He steps back, he rocks, something snaps at the back of his head.

Ley line.

That should have been sign number two.

He steps forward again, cautious, and the forest breathes. The forest breathes and the ley line fizzes and the place is alive ways that Cabeswater both had and hadn’t been. It lives as Cabeswater had; it does not wake like Cabeswater had. It does not wake because it had always been here, natural and always growing.

_ours_

The voice comes as a whisper from the trees, rings from the centre of his own head. Gansey stops and he wishes that he had his recorder with him, in the hopes of picking something up, something to take back to Ronan, show him Cabeswater was not just…

The trees lean in and, if his feet were not so heavy, Gansey would recoil from them. He can see eyes in the branches, hands pressing through the bark.

_ours_

He steps back. The ground opens. He falls.

The earth he lands in is warm and wet; when he looks at his hands, they’re covered in red. His stomach lurches and the voices in his head rise in crescendo.

_ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours ours **ours** _

“No,” he says, but the back of his mind says yes, “No, I’m not.”

He scrambles backwards as best he can, his feet caught, his hands sinking into the red soup of the earth. The air smells metallic. In his head, he sees Cabeswater and wonders if it was ever so grasping, so sinister.

He’s sorry he woke the forest.

The ground loosens around his feet and he pulls himself free, clawing marks in the dirt as he dragged himself back to solid ground. The moment he’s back on his feet, he’s running, his heart beating a tattoo in his ears.

_why are you awake?_

He runs. A headache creeps from the back of his skull to sit behind his eyes. He doesn’t stop until he reaches the car park; the bitumen stops the dragging at his feet and the whispers retreat. He collapses into the front seat of the car and sits for a moment, waiting for the smell of the car to overpower the smell of the forest.

Looking in the rear view mirror, he lightly touched his top lip.

He hadn’t even noticed his nose was bleeding.

 

* * *

 

He dreams.

He lives.

His roots reach down below the earth, squirming among the bones of dead princes, coiling around a skull crowned in ivy. He is as old as time. But that’s not right. He is part of something bigger and there is no more _he_ ; there is only _they_ and _us_ and _we_ are old as the moon.

But that’s not right.

He is Richard Campbell Gansey III. He is a human, one man, with bones and ligaments and veins that run red. He’s beating heart and breathing lungs and tired eyes. He is allergic to bees. He loves Blue Sargent, who is in Washington. He like-loves Henry Cheng, who came back from Vancouver the night before.

He wakes.

Henry is curled around him, arms around his ribcage, one leg slung over his, binding him up in Henry’s limbs. These are soft and warm and living, would yield him if he pulled away. He takes Henry’s hands in his and presses a kiss to his knuckles. He feels Henry smile against his neck, muscles flex against his sides.

“G’morning, Gansey-boy,” he mumbles.

Gansey says nothing. He lets Henry draw him closer and tighter and he wonders if Henry can feel the multitude of heartbeats, thumping alongside his own.

 

* * *

 

He pulls moss from between his fingers but he says nothing to Henry. He picks bark from his ankles and he cries from the pain of it and cleans the blood from the bathroom floor before Henry can see it to question.

That night, he sits in the Pig and rings Blue because every inch of him aches to hear one of his own kind, even though his bones know that Blue is _not_ his kind, not in body.

“Thought you only called when you couldn’t sleep.” Blue’s voice crackles through his speaker, “Which is usually much later than this.”

“I just…want to see you’re enjoying yourself,” Gansey says, and he falters because what he really wants to say is that he’s afraid, wants to ask if she’s found moss under her nails and leaves in her sheets and felt roots beneath the soles of her feet, “Maybe Washington’s for you.”

Blue snorts, “You’d hate it here. Not enough dirt, not enough Welsh princes, nowhere for you to put roots in.”

He winces, glad she can’t see, and reclines the Pig’s seat back as far as it can go. One hand rests over his chest and he feels a heart thumping beneath, steadfast and honest as daylight, and he sighs with relief because no oak he’s ever known has had a heartbeat like his. Only humans.

Only humans.

 

* * *

 

Ronan doesn’t question why Gansey suddenly starts lingering around the Barns.

Or rather, he does, but it’s in looks and raised eyebrows and questions that never make it past his lips. It’s in the way he watches, head cocked like an owl, as Gansey sets about whatever task Ronan points him to.

Gansey doesn’t mind. The Barns has become a refuge, a place where the impossible is normal. If he locks himself in the bathroom to check that his skin is still skin, smooth and soft instead of cracked and hard, to stare at his reflection for a while to make sure it’s a living human face still looking back at him, no one asks. Ronan only smirks and asks how well his beauty routine is working for him.

Opal is different.

She follows him over the fields, the same way she follows Declan; like he’s something shiny and new, a plaything she hasn’t gotten bored of yet. He lets her, because she’s a piece of Ronan, and he knows from experience that trying to tell Ronan and any facets of him to do anything is a wasted exercise. She watches him with eyes like saucers, big and round in the sunlight, kicking her hooves against the fence as he digs a hole for a new post.

“You’re not a person anymore,” she says and he freezes. She grins, slow and easy, Lynch-like at the edges.

“Then what am I?” Gansey asks, humouring her.

Opal holds out her hands, cupped as if to catch water, and Gansey approached to look. A small green acorn sits in her palms, impossible because there’s no oaks she could have plucked it from, but she beams and he notices that she’s chipped a tooth somewhere along the way. She laughs.

“Still growing.”

 

* * *

 

The headaches come and the only thing that quells them is sunlight.

At first, Gansey had thought it was his glasses, a mere case of prescription needing changing. His optometrist tells him no, his prescription has not changed, and she can find nothing wrong with his eyes.

It must be something else, he tells himself as he drives home, headache pressing the space between his temples. When he gets back to Monmouth Manufacturing, his home that is too harsh and artificial to be home to this dark and secret part of him, he stays sat in the Pig with his forehead resting on the steering wheel and basks in the sunlight. The passenger door opens and he doesn’t move, even when Henry drops into the seat and rests one hand on his back. He feels fingers pull at his collar and hears a sigh.

“Gansey-boy,” Henry says, “I wish this was the weirdest thing I’d seen around you.”

Gansey lets Henry pull him back into Monmouth and listens as the other runs a bath, listens to the rush of water and the groan of pipes and can half imagine that it’s rain, that it’s wind among old branches. He stands in the centre of the room, swaying on the spot, and feels a twist of ivy clambering his spine and the brush of leaves against his ear. In the midst of it all, he hears Noah’s voice.

_live_

_this is not you_

_this does not define you_

He almost doesn’t notice as Henry leads him upstairs. He undresses as a robot would, stiff and methodical, and stands under the shower as the water beats a litany of names against his back: _Arthur, Llywelyn, Owain, Gwenllian._ He clenches his teeth and his fists as Henry cuts the ivy from his back and presses in against Henry’s chest. Through wet cloth and skin and muscle and bone, he listens to the thump of Henry’s heartbeat, ringing alongside his own.

“With me, Gansey-boy.”

Gansey’s vision blurred and, for a moment, he sees Noah’s face before his own, sunken and pale, terrified and full of love. Then Henry’s face settles in, worried and dark eyed, his hands on Gansey’s cheeks. Gansey looks down to see leaves and ivy vines around his feet, the water running red where they fell.

“I think,” he said, fingers digging into Henry’s arms, “that this isn’t going to go away.”

Henry snorts, thick with water. He nudges one of the shrivelling, bleeding vines with his toe, “You think? You _know.”_

He doesn’t cling as Gansey slips between his fingers and sinks into a pile at his feet. Gansey stays huddles there, on the shower floor, the wet earth, and feels his skin split open against the push of new growth.

 

* * *

 

When he sleeps, it is deep in the earth, cool and damp and comforting. Noah’s bones lie cradled in his arms. He’s surrounded by roots, and tangled in them are those who wandered and those who are lost, their teeth bared and their empty eyes home to dark secret things.

When he wakes, he is in bed, warm and soft and stifling. Blue’s hand is in his hair, on his neck and shoulders, gentle and comforting as the breeze. She doesn’t flinch away from the bark that’s starting to replace his skin in patches.

“Are you awake?” she asks when he shifts. He grunts his answer and she continues, “I asked…Artemus for some help. He said he’d ask his friends. I haven’t seen him since but Mom says he’s doing what he can.”

“You’re too good to me, Jane.”

She stills, her hand settling among the leaves slowly blooming in his hair, “Gansey. Please. As if I’d ever leave you to turn into a tree.”

“You might like me as a tree.”

“I like you as a _man_.”

He sits up then, a movement that is long and slow and struggling against the stiffness of his joints, his spine, the very core of him. She looks at him with those big wide eyes, eyes that could contain the whole world and Gansey wishes he could lose himself to them rather than this force that holds him.

“You’ll be all right, Gansey,” she says softly, “You came back from the dead.” She leans in and kisses his forehead, “What else can the world throw at you?”

Gansey turns his face away and loops his arms around her waist, hides his face against her hip, “I don’t know. Though maybe it isn’t _this_ world doing the throwing.”


	2. the brotherhood of eye and leaf

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I intended to have this up earlier than this but July was a Month and took a lot out of me emotionally and mentally, in good ways and in bad, and that meant I just didn't have it in me to fic. But it is here now and that's what matters.
> 
> Before we begin, on the note of Artemus: I have genuinely forgotten what he looks like in canon, so I've taken liberties and am excusing it with faery glamour.

_To come into the woods you must leave behind_  
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.  
You must come without weapon or tool, alone  
expecting nothing, remembering nothing  
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.

**_Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1985 V_ **

**_***_ **

Artemus is not human.

In truth, this should have been something obvious; men who make their homes, their lives, within tree trunks and call themselves lights are not human men. But he had, at first glance, _looked_ human or, at the very least, like most humans Gansey knew.

Now, it is obvious how apart from humanity he is.

( _Kindred,_ Gansey’s heart says, and he has to wonder how much it is truly _his_ heart now)

Artemus circles him on legs too long and too willowy, with a grace too old and too wild to ever be properly imitated, the stuff dancers’ dreams were made of. He considers Gansey with eyes that are old and dark, eyes that belong to a thing with a name only the trees know.

“Hm,” he says eventually, “Fuck.”

Gansey swallows and rocks slightly, “You have thoughts?”

“Oh, I have many.” Artemus chews on his bottom lip and there’s an odd green shade to his teeth, like new acorns, “I haven’t seen anything like this.”

Gansey feels his heart drop down to settle somewhere down south, “Never?”

“Never. But I will find something,” Artemus says and his picks at one nail, “As a favour, to Blue.” He looks up again and his expression’s turned mournful. One hand hovers between them, as if he wants to offer comfort but doesn’t know how to; instead, he says, “I can’t see myself in your eyes. There’s green leaves there now.”

 

* * *

 

Niall Lynch is a thief.

He walks, _walked_ and it is hard to distinguish because of how time circles around Them, and picks up and puts down whatever it is that takes his fancy: glass flowers; jewelled feathers; gold rings that sang about love. He is young and distracted and bored with his own mundane world; he is not the first of his kind They have met.

_You will never have a wife of the race of the earth_ They say, a harmless statement, for Cabeswater is not in the business of curses.

“Hm.”

Niall doesn’t say much; it seems that he is looking for something among Their branches and They bristle, because he takes and doesn’t give much back. He steps towards a grove hung with roses and reaches in; when he draws back, there’s a woman’s hand in his. Cabeswater sighs, wind rushing Their leaves and Niall looks but there is no one to meet his gaze.

 

When Gansey sees Ronan again, their conversation is short.

“Cabeswater showed me your parents,” Gansey says, because there’s an ache in his teeth that he wants to ignore and Ronan is the best balm he has.

“Yeah,” Ronan says, and his smile is a thin, sharp edged thing as he looks at the tendrils of ivy curling over Gansey’s forehead, “I bet it fucking did.”

 

* * *

 

Gansey finds himself haunting the place Cabeswater had once been. He circles the place where he’d died and the part of him that is Cabeswater recoils, draws back and away from everything the demon had touched; his circles become smaller and smaller until he’s stationary, rooted to the spot. He can feel cold hands against the leaves sprouting down his spine, gently twist the new green vines blooming through his hair.

“Noah,” Gansey says, and he remembers his dreams, Noah’s bones held against his heart. Remembered. Remembered. _I remember you._

Noah flickers in and out of view and his speech, at first, is white noise; a picture in a television with bad signal. He grounds himself in Gansey, his hands like ice on Gansey’s upper arms, nails cutting little grooves in the skin and bark there.

“I found you,” Noah says, and Gansey isn’t sure if it’s _him_ that Noah is talking to or the forest that now shares his soul, “I know your name.”

And underneath that: _I know your heart._

“Which name?” Gansey asks, “I’ve picked up more, since I last saw you.”

“Gansey,” Noah says and his smile is faint, the shadow of moonlight, “That’s all there is.”

He breathes in time with the wind and the world dissolves, rolls back into a time that could be called kinder. Noah lies in green grass and dappled light, leaning against the trunk of an oak; he looks so at peace, at ease, warm summer wind in his pale hair. Gansey watches him from above and from the sides and is lay beside him in the grass all at once. He’s warm and it’s such a bizarre foreign thing, to associate warmth with Noah.

And then the world blinks back. The soft grass and gentle light are gone, replaced by stiff trees and earth streaked with something black and tarry. Gansey is on his knees and the earth is red in his hands, the smell of iron in his nose and throat. Despite the bark and the leaves and the soft moss, he feels more himself than he has in months. He feels Noah’s hands, cold in his.

“Thanks, Noah,” he says, “I think that we might have the first part of an answer.”

Noah breathes out, a puff of winter air, “All you had to do was ask.”

Gansey sinks to his knees, tucks himself up like a stump, and Noah settles against him. Here, in this time and place, Noah feels jittery and tense, words rolling off him in waves: _please don’t forget me._

 

* * *

 

 

Eventually, Artemus comes for him, all long limbs and leaf green eyes full of fox cubs and spring. He touches Gansey’s shoulder, startling him out of a Cabeswater dream, and helps him to his feet. Gansey’s joints complain but his mind and his heart are glad to be reminded to move, to be human.

“I think there’s a way to help you,” Artemus says, and his every movement flows like water.

Gansey looks for Noah but he’s gone. He heaves a sigh and his bark cracks, his roots lift and he rises, stepping away from the place he’d been. The ley line shudders after parting from him.

“I think,” Gansey says slowly, becoming accustomed to human voice again, “that I know what you’re going to say.”

Artemus raises one delicate eyebrow, “Then I won’t say it. Come.”

He takes Gansey’s hand in his, smooth and dry against Gansey’s bark cracked palm, and pulls him away from the old familiar place. The path they take follows the trail of the ley line, through the old forest and fields of green and gold. Time splits in two: beyond the ley line and their interlocked hands, it’s as thick and slow as treacle but with them, it flows like water. The years fall like leaves and Gansey’s back molar aches and aches and aches.

He doesn’t realise that the fields have given way to forest until Artemus draws him to a slow gentle stop. The trees here are towering and ancient, the trunks gnarled. The air tastes of magic.

“Where are we?” Gansey asks. Cabeswater runs and fizzes in his veins, as if it’s excited. He turns to look back over his shoulder but Artemus catches his jaw.

“Don’t look back,” he says, “We’re here. Just here.”

“Where is here?”

“Cabeswater’s start. Cabeswater’s end.” Artemus draws a circle in the fresh smelling earth, “Cabeswater’s start again.”

He speaks in the old language of trees, which rustles like the wind and drips like rain. The trees around them lean in and pull at Cabeswater; Gansey feels something tear deep inside, in the place where Cabeswater has joined on his soul. The pain in his tooth erupts and he cries out as it pops out of place, his mouth filling with sap. He crumples forward and clings to Artemus as an anchor as the earth, once again, opens beneath him.

This time, the earth is not warm and bloody. Instead, it’s dark and cool and familiar; it’s the earth of his dreams, where he’s slept and been safe and whole.

He falls through time with his stomach somewhere behind his ribs, his heart thumping in his throat and the thread that holds him and Cabeswater together unravelling, a reeling spindle. It starts with his death and Cabeswater’s and they flinch together, one man and a thousand trees all at once, as the demon turns towards them; his leaves spiral upwards as he falls and he watches as they rot where the demon reaches to touch them.

His first death flashes past him, and he closes his ears against the threatening hum of hornets as moss withers on his fingers. Further back, Noah grins, alive and whole, and reaches for a handful of autumn leaves. The thread pulls harder and takes him away from the dream place and Virginia and across a wine dark sea; he plunges through the Welsh forests and centuries pass. Glyndwr passes him by, turning a ring stone over in fingers and Llywelyn’s crown slips through Gansey’s fingers, entwined with ivy.

Eventually, the fall stops and time freezes. Gansey catches a glimpse of an oak; a man’s face looks out at him through the bark, older than the tree he’s imprisoned in. Gansey’s fingertips only brush the bark before the last thread holding Cabeswater to him snaps and he’s pulled back into his own body.

He comes back to still clinging to Artemus and his breath is ragged. He forces himself onto his knees and can’t stop himself from staring down at his hands, the skin pink and new, or running his fingers through hair free of leaves. There’s still a gap in the back of his mouth where his tooth had once been, tender against his tongue.

“What,” he says, “was that?”

“I don’t know,” Artemus says and he stands, helps Gansey to his feet, “But it worked.”

The trees around them whisper and part to let thin beams of moonlight down to the forest floor. There, between the two of them, a new tree was already blooming; its leaves were as white as teeth and pearls.

 

* * *

 

“Ronan says that you were a tree,” Adam says, “I was gone for a semester and you turn into a tree.”

“As if that’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to us.”

“It’s up there.”

Adam settles on the couch and curls around his coffee cup. He looks far more at home than Gansey’s ever seen him, both in the Barns and in his own body, as if he’s grown to match both. Adam looks Gansey up and down; if he notices that Gansey’s wearing one of Henry’s shirts, he doesn’t say anything.

“I used to be scared that would happen to me,” he says, “I’d wake up and think I _was_ Cabeswater. Seems stupid now; what good would I be as eyes and hands if I was a _tree?”_

“Not as stupid as you think.”

Adam takes a long drink of coffee before he speaks again, “It never leaves, you know. Cabeswater.” His fingers brush over his cheek, “It becomes a part of you. More than your own arms, or your own heart.”

Adam, Gansey feels, is too young to say such things and yet he understands it. With his tongue, he feels out the empty gap in the back of his mouth, missing one tooth and he understands. More than any physical mark, a bond with Cabeswater left a mark on the soul, the spirit, the memory. He has, he feels, more kinship with Adam than Ronan or Henry or Blue.

“Would you change it?” Gansey asks, thinking of the pearl-white sprout and how big it might have grown in that secret place, “Your offer to Cabeswater, I mean.”

“No,” Adam says, and downs the rest of his coffee, “It gave more than it took. It gave you back, after all.”

_It nearly took me too,_ Gansey thinks but doesn’t speak. He wants to keep this comfort between them, this feeling forged in the eyes of trees, the touch of leaves and the sound of the wind through branches.

“It did,” Gansey says and he leans into the back of the couch, pulling Henry’s jacket closer and breathing in its comfort and Adam’s humanity, “I’m here.”

And in the secret, magic place where dreams are born, Cabeswater whispers back: _I’m here._


End file.
